About a year ago, Fantasy Flight obtained the license to produce Star Wars related games after Wizards of the Coast allowed their license to lapse. They've since produced a couple products of some interest to me, including a miniatures based tactical combat game, X-Wing. I've been kind of looking at it for about a year, but haven't had opportunity to test it until about 3 weeks ago. A friend picked up the Core set and a Slave I, and we gave it a try.

The mechanics are pretty simple, with each ship having different levels of speed/manoeuverability and weapons. Different pilots will give you different levels of skill and different ships have access to different equipment. Movement is based on an array of templates, and each ship has a dial including all the manoeuvers it can pull off in a turn. Players choose what movement they want to do that turn, locking it in to their dial and placing it face down next to the ship; ships move in lowest to highest pilot skill, then shoot highest to lowest pilot skill, giving skilled pilots tactical advantage.
There's a fair degree of strategy and tactics, with a heavy dose of luck tossed in, making it a fairly dynamic game. Players balance their forces to a certain point total; TIEs are fragile, but cheap, while an X-Wing is robust, but expensive... an Imperial force will tend to have more ships on the table than a Rebel force as a result, but, neither might be at an advantage... Games take between 45min and an hour to complete usually.

Today I ordered a Core set through Amazon; my local shop sells it at about 25% above cost, and won't budge on the price. They sell the expansions at close enough to the right price that I bought an extra X-Wing, TIE, YT-1300 and Slave I from the store.
I'm looking forward to acquiring a Lambda shuttle and TIE Interceptor and some A-Wings and B-Wings to round things out a bit... and playing some more games!

1 blog comments below

Looks like your getting all set up there to take on the galaxy! May the force be with you.